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Everything brought into being under some principle not itself
is contained either within its maker or, if there is any
intermediate, within that: having a prior essential to its being,
it needs that prior always, otherwise it would not be contained
at all. It is the order of nature: The last in the immediately
preceding lasts, things of the order of the Firsts within their
prior-firsts, and so thing within thing up to the very pinnacle
of source.
That Source, having no prior, cannot be contained: uncontained by
any of those other forms of being, each held within the series of
priors, it is orbed round all, but so as not to be pointed off to
hold them part for part; it possesses but is not possessed.
Holding all- though itself nowhere held- it is omnipresent, for
where its presence failed something would elude its hold. At the
same time, in the sense that it is nowhere held, it is not
present: thus it is both present and not present; not present as
not being circumscribed by anything; yet, as being utterly
unattached, not inhibited from presence at any point. That
inhibition would mean that the First was determined by some other
being; the later series, then, would be without part in the
Supreme; God has His limit and is no longer self-governed but
mastered by inferiors.
While the contained must be where its container is, what is
uncontained by place is not debarred from any: for, imagine a
place where it is not and evidently some other place retains it;
at once it is contained and there is an end of its placelessness.
But if the "nowhere" is to stand and the ascription of a "where,"
implying station in the extern, is to fall, then nothing can be
left void; and at once- nothing void, yet no point containing-
God is sovereignly present through all. We cannot think of
something of God here and something else there, nor of all God
gathered at some one spot: there is an instantaneous presence
everywhere, nothing containing and nothing left void, everything
therefore fully held by the divine.
Consider our universe. There is none before it and therefore it
is not, itself, in a universe or in any place- what place was
there before the universe came to be?- its linked members form
and occupy the whole. But Soul is not in the universe, on the
contrary the universe is in the Soul; bodily substance is not a
place to the Soul; Soul is contained in Intellectual-Principle
and is the container of body. The Intellectual-Principle in turn
is contained in something else; but that prior principle has
nothing in which to be: the First is therefore in nothing, and,
therefore, nowhere. But all the rest must be somewhere; and where
but in the First?
This can mean only that the First is neither remote from things
nor directly within them; there is nothing containing it; it
contains all. It is The Good to the universe if only in this way,
that towards it all things have their being, all dependent upon
it, each in its mode, so that thing rises above thing in goodness
according to its fuller possession of authentic being.
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